In the process of taking up motorcycling this summer I also gained an additional hobby: scouring maps and travel guides to find the roads that would be most fun to ride. While I’ve had great times on dirt roads through farmland and wide open highways, there just isn’t anything that compares to the thrill of leaning through the corners on a winding road.

While I’ve had some good successes in locating roads by map (such as Tracy Road), one of the shortcomings of a map is the tight curves you can really lean into tend to be below the resolution for many maps. Atlases and electronic maps like Google Earth allow you to zoom in, but then there is the problem of finding the gems in the sea of data. What I realized I needed was a way to highlight just the most curvy roads so that I would know where to explore next.Continue Reading »

Sarah, my dad, and I took a canoe and kayak trip down the Big Spring Creek in Newville, Pennsylvania. The creek is beautiful, with clear water, many aquatic plants, and much waterfowl.

Since the creek has a tiny drainage and is primarily spring fed, it does not flood regularly (if at all) and is hence heavily silted. For about the first 3rd of our trip, the canoe was constantly scraping the bottom and getting stuck. My dad in the sea-kayak had a little bit shallower draw and only got stuck once.

After the first 3rd of the trip the channel deeped, but was still quite narrow, requiring a lot of maneuvering of the large canoe.

In a few spots fallen trees block the channel, though we were able to gingerly maneuver over or under them.

Be aware that a State Boat Registration sticker is required on all boats.

As of a few days ago, I am now able to generate KML versions of Flickr photosets for viewing in Google Earth/Maps. With that taken care of, I also want to easily combine these KML documents of images together with other KML files that show additional information, such as paths traveled, points of interest, etc.

To accomplish this task, I have written a new script, the KML Joiner that will combine any KML documents on the web together into a single (referenced) KML document. (try it out)

More Detail:for those interested in KML
The resulting document is a collection of network links, each of which points to one of the KML URLs specified. Doing this rather than combining their text together into a static KML document prevents style collisions as well as allows changes in the source data to propagate to the combined document.

Refresh intervals can optionally be specified for every source document allowing for a server-friendly combination of static data with rapidly changing data. By default, no refresh interval is specified, making the linked documents load only once when first accessed.

The map above is of the trip mentioned in a previous blog post, but this time the data sources (1. a static KML file with the path and house placemark, 2. a dynamic KML document generated with my Photo set to KML script) joined together with the KML Joiner script instead of manually put together with a text editor.

One of the things I (and others) have found lacking when working with geotagged images on Flickr, is the inability to retrieve a “photo set” (Flickr’s take on a slideshow) as a KML document that can then be displayed in GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, or other geo-browsers. Flickr provides some KML links and GeoRSS feeds, but these are either limited to 20 items or can only be pointed at tags or users’ photo-streams, not a particular photo set.

To fill this niche, I present a small script I wrote to generate a KML file from the geotagged photos in a set:

KML / GoogleMaps – A set of photos from a trip I took around Turkey, with lines drawn chronologically. Since this is a large set that causes GoogleMaps to time-out, I’ve downloaded the KML file and then re-uploaded it to my website. This is the method I recommend for large photo sets.